Great piece in the Harvard Magazine on the lack of diversity of the teacher workforce. Pointed quotes from within:

"Why does it matter if most minority students have white teachers? For starters, a Center for American Progress study titled America’s Leaky Pipeline for Teachers of Color reports that minority teachers have higher expectations of minority students, provide culturally relevant teaching, develop trusting relationships with students, confront issues of racism through teaching, and become advocates and cultural brokers."

"[I]n literature, students need “mirrors and windows,” meaning they can see them themselves in stories and also experience unfamiliar worlds. ....It doesn’t mean all the people in their lives have to do that mirroring, but they should have some. And we know that in the teaching profession, there really are not enough mirrors.”

The federal government’s teach campaign, which included recruitment visits to colleges campuses like Morehouse by film director Spike Lee, has a goal of recruiting 1 million teachers in the next 10 years, with an emphasis on diversity. Hayes even met with Secretary of Education John King last November about how better to recruit and retain minority teachers.

 Really good points here throughout.  Don't know how many students have come my way ask the questions appearing at the end of this text:

“We’re all thinking, ‘Can I go back into the classroom? Or should I make an impact in education some other way?’”

While education policy is potentially a good way to make a contribution without being in the classroom—we still very much need to address this gap which is not just a "teaching gap," but also a policy one that can help remedy this otherwise systemic paucity of teachers of color in the teaching profession.

Angela Valenzuela


Summer 2016

Where Are All the Teachers of Color?

By Josh Moss, Photographs by Walter Smith, on May 14, 2016 11:27 AM 

Although nonwhite public school students are now the majority in the United States, nonwhite teachers are anything but. Continue reading here.